• Produced and directed by Albert Band
• Written by Brent Friedman and Michael Davis
• Starring
  • Kevin R. Connors
  • Jennifer Harte
  • Dean Scofield
  • Bettye Ackerman
  • Greg Lewis
• Executive produced by Charles Band

“Hey, Dad?”
“Yes, Charlie?”
“Do we still have those cable-control puppets from Prehysteria around here?”
“I think I saw them in the store room just last week.”
“Well, since we’ve already paid for those, why don’t we make another movie with them?”
“Sounds good to me.”

And thus Prehysteria! 2 was hatched. (Although again, the original idea is credited to Pete Von Sholly.) Originally, it was planned that father Albert and son Charles would co-direct as they had the original; as Albert explains in the VideoZone segment, Charles never ended up showing up on the set, so…

It’s not surprising that they immediately cranked out a sequel; not only could they amortize the cost of the central special effect, but it allowed them to strike while the iron of the first movie’s surprising success was still hot. Even with only a year’s gap, though, it isn’t hard to see the well-defined symptoms of sequelitis, manifesting mainly as a tightening of budgetary resources.

To bridge the gap between the premise of the last movie and the setup for this one, the Taylors’ geriatric neighbor (Owen Bush) shows up at the greenhouse in which the dinos live to feed them while they’re on vacation. It seems that in the interim, somebody’s been feeding the critters brain food, because they sure are a lot more intelligent this time around. A lot more. Like, Lassie-smart. They manage to outwit the old man and sneak from the greenhouse to get at the raisins in the Taylors’ storeroom. (By the way, the greenhouse used here approximates pretty well the one built to house the dinos in the first movie; if you somehow manage not to notice the painted backdrop every time the door is opened, you might almost believe it isn’t on a soundstage.)

Great. Mini-dinosaurs giving themselves the runs. Swell.

The dinos proceed to gorge themselves on raisins, even Elvis the T-Rex. (By the way, Elvis was rendered with both a cable-controlled full model, and a head-only hand-operated version that allowed for stronger biting action. I mention this not only as technical trivia, but to explain why we keep seeing the edge of Elvis’s rubber neck enter the frame as he scarfs down raisins.) But no sooner have they gotten a mouthful, than two workers come in to shovel up the raisins into crates for shipping. The dinos hide themselves in the raisin piles, and thanks to the workers’ inability to notice that they’re shoveling big lumpy things the size of cats along with the raisins, the five dinos soon find themselves packed in a raisin crate.

There is some actual product placement going on here, I should note; the logo for Sun-Maid, America’s most (only?) recognizable brand of raisins, is plastered all over crates and railway cars for the rest of the movie. Frankly, I think that was a bad decision on Sun-Maid’s part, as the treatment the raisins get is scarcely appetizing: Stored directly on the concrete floor of a room with a door so loose that even reptiles can open it, scooped up with shovels by men who tread all over them with workboots, kept in unfinished wooden crates with open-hole handles on the side… Nope, doesn’t increase my desire to eat a Sun-Maid raisin one little bit.

Okay – on to our human cast! Brendan Carrington (Kevin R. Connors), the spoiled and attention-deprived son of young tycoon Colin Wellington (Dean Scofield), returns to his palatial mansion after raising hell at boarding school. He’s such a troublemaker that, as soon as they hear of his arrival, the household staff runs to hide: Ivan (Greg Lewis), the gardener who talks to his plants in what I’m sure was meant to be a Russian accent, but sounded more Hollywood-Italian to me; and Mr. Hiro (Michael Hagiwara), the Japanese chef who sings nonsense food lyrics to karaoke music and converses only in lyrics from classic rock-and-role songs. I somehow suspect that, had the budget been any higher, the extra money would have gone toward hiring even more lame ethnic stereotypes to populate the household.

Oh, and Miss Winters (Bettye Ackerman), the black-garbed and iron-wigged governess/household executive, who previously ran the father’s young life and currently runs the son’s. You know that if they want to make an attitude-laden child like Brendan sympathetic, they have to give him a nemesis who both justifies his acting-out and deserves whatever she gets, and Miss Winters fulfills that role expansively; even the Baby Jesus Himself would be sore tempted to kick her in the shins after a heaping helping of her stern disapproval. How bad is she? Well, she greets Brendan by locking him in his room until his father gets home. He escapes out the window and goes roaming to…

…the nearby trainyard, which will be the second of our major two locations. There, Brendan runs afoul of a group of toughs his age, and in trying to escape from them, he meets urchin Naomi (Jennifer Harte), who works in the yards with her father, in the Sun-Maid raisin car. The two of them are just about to have their asses handed to them when the dinos conveniently break out of their crate. Madonna the pterodactyl, fling around the Alpha Tough’s head on a fishing line, gets her wing broken by his swatting, which conveniently frees the production from the more expensive stop-motion and bluescreening required to put the flying creature on screen.

The Wicked Witch of the Worst.

Of course, knowing who the protagonists are, the dinos don’t attack Brendan and Naomi; instead they blink cutely up at children who are foolish enough to start stroking strange reptiles they found in a box. Immediately, Brendan and Naomi launch into a custody battle over the critters, which ends when Brendan pulls a huge wad of banknotes out of his pocket and buys the whole crate of raisins from the yard foreman and arranges to have it delivered.

Of course, once he gets the crate, he has to sneak it inside without alerting Miss Winters, who is allergic to every kind of animal; thus we get a Looney Toons-style sneak-through-the-house segment, complete with dinos getting out and causing some mischief. The chasmosaurus Hammer in particular shows some skill at the kind of Off-Screen Teleportation usually exhibited only by serial killers; how else could a small animal with elephantine feet climb up to the piano to plink some random notes?

Once Brendan gets them to his room, the dinos exhibit more of that Lassie-grade intelligence: When Miss Winters bursts in, demanding to know what kind of lifeform he’s dragged home this time, the dinos all stand stock-still like plastic toys (I mean, more so than normal); and when Brendan picks up a remote control to demonstrate how his “toys” work, the T-Rex is clever enough to start moving mechanically (I mean, more so than normal).

We finally meet Brendan’s father at dinner, as he answers his cell phone every fifteen seconds and barks Wall Street jargon at underlings. Funny, with a name like “Wellington” one might infer that this is supposed to be a family with “old money,” but Dad definitely acts like a self-made tycoon. Oh, well, we’re watching a movie with miniature dinosaurs running around; I suppose one more element of unlikelihood isn’t going to hurt.

“‘Aarrgh’ your own damn self.”

By the next day, Naomi comes to see the dinosaurs (I’m guessing he’s the only filthy-rich kid who lives within walking distance of the train yard, so it’s not really such a stretch that she tracked him down). This gives, y’know, poignancy and stuff when Naomi goggles over the cool toys with which his bedroom is filled, and Brendan’s all ready to give it all away for some quality time spent with his workaholic father. Oh, and they spend a little bit of time jumping on his in-room trampoline. Now, where have I seen this before? Oh, right – Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins, jumping on a trampoline in a toy-filled room in Big (1988). That sort of lends an odd sexual subtext to this innocent preteen friendship, doesn’t it?

And now for the big plot complication (you knew there had to be one sooner or later, right?): Because of her allergies, Miss Winter is convinced that there are rats or something in the house, so she calls in the exterminators: a couple of delusionally paramilitary galoots named Ketcham (Alan Palo) and Killum (familiar character actor Larry Hankin, whose nametag actually reads KILLLUM). To hide the dinos from the exterminators, Brendan and Naomi take the crate up to the attic – because no exterminator would ever look for vermin in an attic, right? There, they find a massive model train set that had once belonged the Brendan’s father, now fallen into disrepair. And Brendan has a brainstorm: Dad’s birthday is coming up in a couple of days, so wouldn’t it be great to fix everything up as a present? And maybe a not-so-subtle suggestion as to how he could spend some time with his son? (Again, we’re supposed to believe that this train set has been here in the attic since Dad’s own childhood, despite the fact that this house is far too new to have been Dad’s childhood home. But again, why strain at a gnat and swallow a dinosaur?)

The rest of the movie proceeds as follows:

- Ketcham and Killum try to find the mysterious animals in the house, along the way becoming convinced that the house is actually haunted. Along the way, they contribute some good old-fashioned Home Alone-style pratfalls.

- Brendan, Naomi, and the dinosaurs repair the train set in a montage of oldies-style rock’n'roll (a motif established in the last movie).

“Well, we may be evolved from shrew-like creatures, but I’m sure we can do the job!”

- Brendan and Naomi start “borrowing” objects from around the house to complete the train model, such as Ivan’s shears, Mr. Hiro’s kitchen clock, and Miss Winters’ little gold bell. This actually gets pretty bizarre, even apart from the fact that Brendan, being a rich kid, could just buy whatever he needs: To sneak Ivan’s shears away from him, they plant a walkie-talkie in the shrubbery and fool Ivan into thinking that his dogwood sapling is actually starting to talk back to him. To get Mr. Hiro’s clock, Brendan joins him in a “moving” karaoke that’s almost too painful to listen to. And to get Miss Winters’ bell, they sneak into her room and get caught when she comes in to brush her wig (revealing her patchy bald scalp, appropriate to your favorite radiation-blighted post-apocalyptic setting).

Eventually, of course, Miss Winters discovers the dinosaurs (the scene in which she chases them down the hall with her broom is notably for showing quite clearly the cable controls running up the T-Rex’s tail), and attempts to have them “taken care of” by the exterminators; it’s only through the help of Ivan and Mr. Hiro that her foul plans are negated, just in time for Dad to get his birthday present and realize that he needs to spend more time with his son. Awww…

In terms of drama, this movie actually has a more valid emotional core than the last one. Sure, “neglected child attempts to win favor of parent” is a threadbare cliche, but it’s still better than “Dad gets over Mom’s death by seeing the legs of the woman from the museum.” And the spot at which the movie stops is actually the end of the story.

On the other hand, the dinosaurs are less central to this story; while they end up being the reason that Brendan discovers the train set in the attic, they could easily be replaced or written out.

Killer instincts die hard.

The dinosaurs themselves are getting a little ratty, too. In the “repairing the model” montage, the chasmosaurus swishes a paintbrush tied to his tail, and there’s an obvious hole in the foam rubber of his tail where his metal endoskeleton shows through.

I’m a little hesitant to see just how much the budget and the props will have deteriorated by the next year’s Prehysteria! 3.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  Larry Hankin (Killam) played “Gaunt Gary” in a few episodes of Voyager